Criticism
A professor of Kabbalah at Hebrew University of Jerusalem has bemoaned the hijacking of kabba'lah by various New Age authors and has given Halevi as an example. Joseph Dan, in his work The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, writes in footnote 57 to the introduction:
- Another distressing phenomenon is connected with the numerous books concerning kabbalah, its history, nature, and traditions, as instruction for modern living, published by "Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi" who is a nice English gentleman from Hampstead who does not know any Hebrew. His books were used as authentic, scholarly source by many, including Simo Parpola.
In 'Authorized Guardians' in Polemical Encounters (Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (ed.), Leiden:Brill, 2007; p. 89) Prof. Boaz Huss at Ben-Gurion university points at the fact that the criticism launched at Halevi does appear in the chapter 'The christian kabbalah'. These and other attempts can be viewed as 'boundary-constructing discourse' and 'othering of the enemy', depicting him as 'debased' or 'degenerated' in order to annihilate him (cp. Huss in Hammer/Von Stuckrad, 2007, xiii). Halevi lives in the London borough of Brent.
Read more about this topic: Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)